Regina and I went for a long walk, all the way down to the breakwater and out it half-way. There, we watched the sailboarders cruising like seagulls across the harbor’s placid water. One intrepid soul even inflated his board. He had to be tired even before embarking on his flight. On the other side, the sea was anything but placid. There, surfers rode their waves, feeling their thrills crest. The waves marched in orderly lines toward the shore. Some of the waves, instead of the shore, crashed into the breakwater. We watched as the waves thundered against the Jetty’s rocks, leaving a churning maelstrom of foaming surf. We enjoyed the resulting gentle spray against our cheeks, until a larger wave, encountering the boulders sent a jet of liquid ocean directly at us. I was hit a glancing blow, but Regina took the full force, leaving her upright but drenched.

The churning of the sea made me reflect on the last few days adventures. This morning, I had embarked on another walk, over the tide-pools. There I encountered fresh shells and fossilized shells. Some of these shells appeared to have not evolved an iota over millions of years. I began musing about the seemingly unchanging DNA, but how it churns as it gets mixed in each generation. It also remembered my studies in Genesis that convinced me that Genesis (ie God) has no problem with evolution, but the popular and flawed interpretation denies it completely. This seems a thoroughly different experience from the previous day, but this churning unchanging DNA is tied up in it also.

Yesterday, we motored to a Neolithic site, where they constructed burial mounds using Megaliths. These were farmers, not hunter-gatherers. I had studied Adam and Eve in the Bible. I realized that Adam was the first farmer and had lived by the Mountain Karacadag, in southern Turkey. Therefore, I studied the advent of farming. Scientists determined that Lentils were domesticated in a region around Karacadag. Chickpeas had a much smaller range, so had to have been domesticated very near Karacadag, but the most telling was einkorn wheat. DNA testing of all the wild einkorn wheat, and all the domestic varieties showed that it was domesticated either on Karacadag, or a few miles to the west. As soon as the farmers had these three crops and another five, making the founder package, along with domestic sheep, farming exploded. DNA testing of men showed that farmers were much more successful and quickly became overcrowded, thus moved on to similar climes. These men carried the J2 male haplotype from Kurdistan. One of the directions they spread was westward, anywhere that had a similar mediterranean climate. The end of their road was Portugal, where they built the stone structures we viewed.

As I pondered the DNA evidence, I picked up a National Geographic that Regina had recently purchased. It was on race and DNA. The DNA evidence says that there is no “race” Just like the ocean, the DNA churns. All non-Africans are descended from a group of Hazda people. These black people are much more closely related to all non-Africans than they are to most of the other Africans. Since the Sang people are more different from Hadza than we are, they should be a different race. In fact, If we say there is an Asian race and a European race, by that logic, we must say that there are 100’s of African races. Race is just a social construct, but meaningless scientifically.

Everyone who has had their DNA analyzed finds that they are a mixture from many different groups but we can all trace our ancestors back to a single African mother and a single African father. As I studied more about Adam and Eve, I realized that Adam lived about 10,000 years ago, but Adam of Chap 1 refers to men and women and lived some unknown number of generations before Adam and Eve, thus they were very different people from Adam and Eve of Genesis 2. They could have lived 70,000 years ago, or 200,000. The one thing that can’t be done is the racist interpretation that was first done to create our modern interpretation of Adam and Eve. There, they said that Adam was created in the Middle East, justifying slavery because African were sub-human. Instead, God created mankind in Africa and every human is made in God’s image. The churning, churning, churning of DNA has made each of us different, a wonderful blend of many different groups and all the same, equally created in God’s image.

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Published by isaiah46ministries

Regina Davis-Sowers was ordained in August 2005, and I earned my doctorate in Sociology in 2006. I consider myself a teacher, above all else, that wants to help people examine God's word, so that they can understand how it pertains to their lives and have their faith created or sustained. Rev. Regina writes her blog, the Hope for Tomorrow posts, and the Bible Study.
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